The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle Part 24

Strangely enough, though it had been Mollie who had precipitated this thing, it was Betty who now took the lead. Softly she went over to the shrinking man and put a gentle hand on his shoulder.

"You say you did not kill your brother?" she questioned in so calm a voice that the girls marveled at her. "You are sure you did not?"

"No! no!" cried the man again raising his haggard face, deep-lined with the marks of suffering, "No--I am not sure. Can you not see? It is that that is killing me. Yet in my sane moments I know that he was dead. He lay there, so white, so still, with only that red, red stream of blood to mar his whiteness. I leaned down, I listened to his heart----" The man had evidently forgotten the presence of the girls, engulfed as he was in the horror of the incident he related. Once more he was living the tragedy, and the girls, tense, strained, horrified, lived it with him.

"I listened to his heart," the man repeated, his arms stretched out before him, his long, delicate hands gripped with a fierceness that made the knuckles go white. "There was no beating. I put my face close to his mouth to see if there was breath. But he had stopped breathing--forever!

"My heart went cold. I seized him by the shoulders. I called him by his name--that brother that I had loved! Oh, how I had loved him. I begged him to come back to me, to open those gray lips that a moment before had been beautiful with life--to speak to me--and all the time----" his hand relaxed and pointed to the floor and the girls followed the movement fascinated--"there kept spreading and spreading on the rug a deep red stain--my brother's blood! _Mon Dieu!_ And when I staggered to my feet I found that the horrible stuff had clung to my fingers--they were dark and sticky--the fingers of a murderer! I went mad then, I think. I rushed from the house, from the place. One thing only was in my mind. To get away--to get away from Paris, that accursed city----" He paused, staring at the floor, and the girls waited, hardly daring to move for fear they would break the spell.

"The rest is like a bad dream to me," the man continued in a weary voice. "Ghost-ridden, haunted, I came to this country incognito--under what you call an a.s.sumed name. For a short time I stayed in New Orleans----"

"But your violin!" Betty interrupted in a voice that amazed her, it seemed so little and weak. "Surely you were under contract."

The man turned on her what was almost a pitying look from his sunken eyes.

"I could not play," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders. "To have gone to my manager would have been like going to the hangman--the electric chair, what you have in this country. No, mademoiselle, I was a murderer, a man hunted by his fellowmen. There was but one thing for me to do--to hide, to dodge about like a rabbit from a pack of baying dogs.

Hide!" he added bitterly. "I could not hide from myself.

"Always when the night grows dark and the wind it makes to howl around this place I can hear my brother's voice uplifted in anger. We quarreled over something my uncle had said--a foolish quarrel. He called me liar, and I--something snapped in my brain, I think, and for a moment everything went red. There was a wine bottle on the table--we had been drinking--blindly I struck out with it---- Now, when the darkness comes and the wildcat calls into the night with a scream like a soul in torment, I hear again the tinkling of that bottle as it shattered, the short groan, the falling of a heavy body.

"It is a wonder that I have not gone mad," he said. "Many a time I have prayed that I might or that I might find courage to end this miserable life and go to join my brother. But I am a coward, a coward----" His voice lowered till it was almost inaudible and tears trickled through the long white fingers. "I have not the courage even to die. There is a tribunal above that I should have to face, more just, more awful, than any man-made law. There you have what Paul Loup has become."

"But you must not speak that way," said Betty, whose quick mind had been forging ahead while the man had been speaking. "It is one thing to kill a man deliberately, and quite another to kill in hot blood, blindly.

Besides," she added eagerly, "you are not even sure that you did kill your brother. Did you--have you seen the papers since--since you ran away?"

"No," said the man. His tone was dead, hopeless. "I was afraid of what I might find there. He was dead, Mademoiselle," he added wearily. "When I say that there is a doubt of that it is simply to give myself one little excuse for continuing to live. He did not move, he did not breathe. Ah, yes, he was dead, quite dead."

There was silence for a moment while Betty thought rapidly. Amy and Mollie and Grace stared wide-eyed with the feeling that they were witnessing some tremendous, swift-moving drama.

"Of course," said the man, breaking the silence abruptly, his somber eyes upon Betty, "there is but one thing left for me now to do. I shall surrender to the authorities--a thing which I should have done long ago.

Or," he added grimly, "you might rather go with me now. If you left me I might attempt to escape--so you will think, Mademoiselle?"

There was a lift at the end of the sentence that made it a question and, startled, the girls looked at Betty to see what she would say.

The Little Captain herself was startled. Evidently the man thought they had been tracking him, had used their knowledge to trap him.

"Oh, it isn't as you think!" she cried impulsively. "We never had the slightest little wish to harm you. And please, please," she added earnestly, "don't give yourself up to the authorities, or do anything rash until you hear from me again. You may not believe me--I wouldn't blame you if you didn't----" she went on shyly, for the man had risen and was staring at her, "but all we want to do is to help you if we can----" she broke off confusedly for the look in the man's eyes silenced her.

"You know I am Paul Loup," he cried hoa.r.s.ely. "You have heard my story, my confession from my own lips, and still you say that you wish me no harm! Who are you? what are you? what do you want of me?" He had advanced toward them, and in a panic the girls moved back toward the open door. Only Betty stood fearlessly in his path.

"We are the Outdoor Girls, and we are living just at present on Gold Run Ranch," she said quietly. "We found out who you were because you were good enough to play for us at a benefit we gave at the Hostess House at Camp Liberty some time ago. And we came up here because we thought that you were in trouble and that we might help you. If we can't help you, I'm sorry." And with head bravely uplifted Betty turned toward the door.

She had almost reached it when he called to her.

"You are a brave girl," said Paul Loup slowly, his eyes intent on Betty's pretty face, "How do you know that I--the murderer--will not kill you also for this knowledge you have of me?"

Betty heard the frightened gasp of the girls behind her, but, strangely enough, she herself felt no fear.

"You wouldn't do that," she said, her clear gaze holding his burning one. "You could not wish harm to a friend."

"Is that what you wish me to consider you--a friend?" asked the strange man, feeling suddenly as though something warm and vital had closed about his heart.

"If you will," replied Betty, reaching out her hand. "I would like very much to be."

But Paul Loup, for all he was a murderer and an outcast, was also a Frenchman. With a quick gesture, ignoring her outstretched hand he caught her in his arms, held her there for a minute, then, releasing her, kissed her gently, first on one cheek, then on the other.

"I had forgotten there were kind hearts in the world," he murmured brokenly, turning from her. "You have restored my faith. _Au revoir_, my friend."

Someway, somehow, the girls found themselves outside that little cabin, making their way blindly down the path to where their horses were tethered. In a daze they mounted and rode off down the trail.

When they came to the open trail they found that Betty was crying, openly, unashamed. Mollie pushed a handkerchief into her hand, but the Little Captain did not seem to notice it. She stared straight ahead, her cheeks burning, the tears rolling unchecked down her face.

"Never mind, honey," said Mollie, trying to steady her voice. "It was hard for you, I know; but I would give anything I own to have made him feel that way about me. I don't care if he did commit murder. I'm for him--strong."

"To be all alone," said Betty as though Mollie had not spoken, "and so heart-hungry that a little sympathy from a stranger----" A sob choked the rest of her sentence. But a moment later she faced the girls with a light of resolve s.h.i.+ning in her eyes.

"Girls," she said, "I don't believe Paul Loup is a murderer, and some way or other I'm going to prove it. A man like that just couldn't commit murder. I know it!"

CHAPTER XXII

THE PLAN

Certainly the girls had never expected such startling developments from Mollie's simple little ruse to find out who the mysterious Hermit of Gold Run was. In the beginning it had been something of a lark, and they never dreamed that their interest and curiosity would uncover such a tragedy.

However, they were not at all in sympathy with Betty's conviction that Paul Loup had not really killed his brother.

"I don't see how you get that way, Betty," Grace argued hotly. "We all feel as sorry for the hermit as you do, but we have his own word for it that he really killed his brother."

"He did seem to be pretty sure of it," said Amy, with a quaver in her voice. "When the wind rose last night and wailed around the house, I got all creepy thinking of him alone up in that dreary little shack, living that whole horrible thing over again."

It was the next day, and the girls were in the saddle, as usual. They had visited the new gold diggings and found everybody excited and optimistic, though no gold had been uncovered as yet. And now they were trotting slowly along the open road, their thoughts busy with the startling happenings of the day before.

"It's a wonder he doesn't go crazy," shuddered Mollie, taking up the thread where Amy had dropped it. "I know I would. What was it he said about being 'ghost-ridden?'"

"I don't believe he is ghost-ridden at all, except by his imagination,"

said Betty positively. "I think if he had taken the trouble to look at the newspapers before he decided that he was a hunted man he might have saved himself a lot of trouble and unhappiness."

"Goodness, how do you get that way, Betty?" Grace said irritably. "The man ought to be the best judge of whether he killed anybody or not."

"Well," said the Little Captain stubbornly, "it seems to me it would have had to be a pretty heavy bottle with a pretty strong arm behind it to kill a man with one blow. And a scalp wound bleeds horribly, you know."

The girls looked a little thoughtful, and for the first time since Betty had advanced her theory they began to think that there might possibly be something in it after all.

"That's right," said Amy, and then went on to relate an experience she had had when skylarking with Sarah Stonington.